Hi! I recently bought a usted Yamaha RBX170, im planning to.replace the pickups and since I'm going to dismantle all the electronics, i want to put shielding on the bass, i've got all the necessary tools, I already bought the cooper tape with conductive adhesive and I have a pretty good idea of how to do It, The problem is that all the online manuals only talk about how to shield basses with a pickguard, and my model doesn't have one, so i was wondering how I should proceed? Should I place the copper tape only in the controls cavity? Or should I also put tape on the pickup cavities even though the Faraday cage will not be closed? On the other hand, on one of the edges of the bass there's a plastic plate where the output jack is screwed, should I also put tape on that plate? Please help this newbie to get rid of EMI induced noise!
Yeah, I looked at the model of the bass, it should be pretty simple. Once you get it apart, you may find that it is already shielded to some extent.
You don't have to go crazy with the shielding foil and since you already have it, just go ahead and use it.
You will need a soldering iron. For this kind of stuff, hot and fast is usually a good idea to make good solder joints. I use a 50 watt iron most of the time.
First off, take a look under the control cover and figure out where the grounding scheme is centralized. Usually, good practice is to pick one of the pots and use the metal body of the pot as the central grounding point. They probably did that already in manufacture. Use that as the center of the "star" for your grounds.
The control cover should get a layer of foil. You'll also need to make sure that foil is grounded. A common way is to use a small ring terminal at one of the screw holes, with a wire that runs to central ground. You just slip the ring terminal under the screw as you install the cover.
Then you have the control cavity, which is the most work. If there's no conductive paint or shielding there, you'll have to take the pots out, line the cavity with foil and re-install the controls. Usually, the mechanical connection of the pots to the foil will be sufficient electrical connection to ground.
Even though you got the conductive adhesive type, I've found that in a year or two, it isn't so conductive anymore. So at any point where you have overlapped foil, go back after you are completely done and place a small bead of solder to join the foils together electrically. Just a drop will do it.
Under each pickup, you may find a brass shielding plate already. If you can use that with your new ones, you're done. Make sure they have a wire to connect them back to the central ground.
Your new pickups may already have shielded wire, if so, easy-peezy, nothing to do there. If they are just a pair of wires, the easiest way to shield them is just add a third wire and twist them all together at about 1-2 turns per inch. No need to go nuts. That extra ground wire should connect to the foil you put in the cavity.
It is not necessary to hermetically seal the guitar with foil. Gaps are ok. What is important is everything is electrically connected to ground. All points of the foil and all exposed metal and the strings and the nut on the output jack should read close to 0-ohms on the lowest scale of your multimeter.
